Case study: Winyama creates an online learning course

Location intelligence platform Winyama found a way to deliver their learning content online to help continue education.

The WA-based and indigenous-owned company began this digital journey during the infancy of Covid as people started to work from home.

Tim Cable, IT consultant at Winyama told Digital Nation this digitisation was to help indigenous groups learn about creating maps.

He said they first thought about doing an informative conference but decided against it.

“We thought let's try and innovate a bit more. Our main weakness with that is people need to be engaged in that online space for multiple days. People might burn out, and you don't have the people in the room to give that energy and keep people engaged,” he said.

Instead, Winyama created a learning management system (LMS) where users can access courses around mapping wherever, whenever. 

Cable noted one of the challenges the company faced was making sure everyone had access to that content.

“Usually at in-person events, if you have everyone in the same place, you can hand out some laptops, you can have those laptops pre-configured with the software, people need all those kinds of things,” he said.

“But in the online space, where everyone's bringing their own device to the table, and you don't have people on hand and in their house to support them, what do you do?”

He said there was a missing ingredient to their solution, which they turned to AWS for.

“We can monitor usage, I can see invocations, so when someone has clicked the link in our LMS, that would start up a virtual lab session,” he explained.

The software has also been beneficial for trainers too, Cable said.

“When we have people who want to publish a course, usually we encourage them to think about the people who will be using virtual labs rather than their own computer,” he said.  

“The advantage being that the user is going to see exactly the same. As I record their video and are doing demonstration, it's exactly the same environment that we'll be using.”